The Girl in the Green Raincoat (16 page)

“Tess—is the baby coming?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on inside me.”

In Baltimore public schools, they tell you in sixth grade where babies come from, but precocious Tess Monaghan had scored that information from her older cousins before she was eight. Now, at thirty-five, in despair over her lack of maternal instincts, she had finally learned where mothers come from. She knew what it was like to fight for her own life, but this had been different. She was defending her daughter. Now she could only hope that she hadn’t killed her in the process.

N
o one should long to forget the night her first child is born, but Tess Monaghan did. She wished she could erase every detail of the evening from her mind. Not just that evening, but the weeks that followed as well. Upon arrival at Johns Hopkins, she was taken to an operating room for an emergency C-section. She begged them to wait for Crow, but there was no time to spare. She and her daughter were both in distress. “Your husband wouldn’t be allowed in the O.R., anyway,” a nurse told her, meaning to console her.

Yes, take the baby away from me
, Tess thought as she slipped under the anesthesia.
Save her from me
. The adrenaline of the encounter with Carole Epstein had ebbed and Tess no longer saw herself as her child’s warrior-mother, but her greatest liability. Oh, hadn’t she been clever, sitting there with her iPhone and her laptop and her composition books. The Land of Counterpane indeed, fighting her battles with toys and proxies. Then one of the toy soldiers had shown up, larger and far more lethal than she seemed at a distance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a Department of Social Services worker is waiting when I wake up, ready to take the baby from me.

Instead, there was Crow.

“She’s fine,” he said quickly. “In neonatal intensive care because she’s only thirty-four weeks. But she’s almost four pounds, which is pretty good.”

“What does she look like?”

“My hair, your eyes, and a little rosebud of a mouth that’s wholly her own. She doesn’t look like a Fifi, though. We need a real name.”

But Tess had always known the name she wanted. She just hadn’t allowed herself to say it out loud. “The tradition is to pick someone who’s died. Remember my friend Carl? I’d like to name her Carla.”

Crow hesitated, and Tess thought he might object, that he might want a less sad legacy for their daughter. Carl had died under such horrible circumstances. But wasn’t all death horrible? “I’ll agree to Carla if you let me have the middle name I want: Scout.”

Tess smiled. “Carla Scout Monaghan. It will make my mother
insane
!” Then she realized that she was a mother herself, and the thought of making a parent insane had suddenly lost much of its appeal.

It turned out that Carla Scout was years away from such empathetic insight. Two days later she had a hemorrhage, apparently just for the hell of it.

The neonatal intensive care unit was pretty much the saddest place that Tess Monaghan had ever known, and she had seen her share of sad places. All those tiny babies, all those devastated parents. Carla Scout was the biggest patient, a behemoth. “Why is she even here?” Tess overheard one mother whisper the first week. She knew from the nurses that this woman’s son had been born at twenty-six weeks, so tiny that he could fit in the palm of one’s hand. Carla Scout Monaghan was huge by comparison. Yes,
looking
at her, even in the Isolette, in that welter of tubes and machines, it was hard to see that anything was wrong. Tess wanted to lean over and hiss: “She had a hemorrhage. We’re waiting to see how this will affect her. Happy now?”

Yet she knew the other mother was simply trying to find a place to offload her fear and terror. Tess couldn’t blame her. She wanted to do the same thing. Problem was, her anger and fear always circled back to her.

She had to blame herself. No one else would. She wished Crow would throw it in her face, how he had told her that her obsession with the Epsteins was unhealthy. She recalled how Mrs. Zimmerman warned her that morbid thoughts would warp her baby. She remembered Lenhardt telling her that parenthood would be her greatest joy, and if she were unlucky, her greatest sorrow. Yes, all the fairies had come to her child’s christening. But she was the one who had cursed her.

“If only—” she began one afternoon.

“Stop, Tess,” Crow said, taking her hand. This time she listened. She was sitting in one of the rocking chairs placed among the Isolettes. Carla Scout had been here almost a month. Halloween, Thanksgiving, her official due date had come and gone. Tess’s stitches had dissolved, she had pumped gallons of breast milk, hoping she might one day feed her own child. But for now the baby lived in this Isolette. Back home, the leaves had fallen and Stony Run Park was so stark and bare that Tess could see through to the other side—all the way to Blythewood Road. Blythewood. Blithe Wood. A pretty name for a pretty street where two exceedingly ugly people had lived. But she had been the blithe one, thinking she controlled everything.

Spouses can’t be compelled to testify, but there’s no law against
volunteering
to do so, and the Epsteins proved quite eager to trade allegations.
She
killed Mary Epstein.
He
kept two sets of books, bilked his own company, and killed Danielle when she found out.
She
stole her sister’s jewelry and Annette’s, too. No,
he’s
the one who had the jewelry all along. Tess wished there were a system in which the two of them could be locked up forever, with only each other’s company.
That
would be justice. Instead, Don pleaded to twenty years, while Carole was holding out for a trial in Mary Epstein’s death. It couldn’t be proved that she pushed her sister down the stairs, and even if she had sickened Annette with antibiotic-laden muffins, they weren’t the cause of her death. Frankly, Tess thought someone should go back and look at the car accident that had taken the lives of Carole’s parents. She wouldn’t put anything past the woman.

But she had no room in her head for the Epsteins, not anymore. Everything was the baby—the sad, silent journey back and forth to Hopkins, the empty evenings, the spike of fear every time a phone rang. She let her father work on the nursery because it was clearly
his
way of coping, but it depressed her, watching the room take shape. The days dragged by. Some families triumphed and took their children home. New families arrived to take their place. And some families—well, some families, she just didn’t want to think about.

“I’ve seen much sicker babies than yours get better,” the nurse told Tess. The nurses were goddesses in NICU, the ones the parents trusted. Tess asked them again and again: “Did I do this to my baby?” They always said no. She wanted to believe them.

After the hemorrhage, the doctors had hustled Tess and Crow into a place the parents called the Room. The Room was like something out of a Stephen King novel, a perfectly bland conference room where the most horrible things happened. Unearthly sounds, inhuman sounds, emanated from the Room. The day they took Tess and Crow to the Room, the doctors were quite gentle. No, it wasn’t good that she had hemorrhaged. But it was only a two on a four-point scale. They had seen babies suffer much worse and go on to lead full and normal lives.

“Did I do this to my baby?” Tess asked.

The doctor said no, that her premature labor was a godsend. Her placenta had failed, something absolutely outside her control, the baby had stopped getting nourishment. An emergency C-section would have been ordered after Tess’s next ultrasound. She didn’t believe him.

Christmas zipped by, then New Year’s, squares on a calendar. Tess’s laptop was restored to life, but she seldom turned it on.

On the first Monday in January, she and Crow showed up at the hospital—and were taken to the Room again. She reached for Crow’s hand; it was slick with sweat.

“I want to tell you,” their doctor said, “that I think Carla Scout is ready to go home. You’ll need oxygen and a monitor—”

“She’s going home?” Tess asked. “Just like that?” She didn’t know it was possible to get good news in the Room. She didn’t trust it.

“We’re pretty good at what we do here,” the doctor said. “Think of it this way. She was six weeks early. She’s going home only a few weeks after her original due date.”

“But how—I mean, what do you know? How can you be sure? What about her vision? What about brain development? Respiratory problems?” Tess cast around, trying to remember all the other dire things she had read on the Internet. “Are you
sure
she’s okay?”

“Carla Scout is stable. She has no impairment that we can detect. But no, Tess, I don’t have a crystal ball. You want me to give you some kind of guarantee that everything will be fine, forever. I can’t do that. I can’t do that for any of our patients. Oh, I’m reasonably sure that your daughter has no lingering effects from the premature delivery. However, you and Crow—you and Crow most certainly do. And you’re going to have to get over it. Welcome to parenthood.”

They left the NICU, stunned with happiness. Tess realized that her hair was dirty and her clothes didn’t feel quite clean. When had she last bathed? Back when she was on bed rest she had promised herself that she would shower once, twice, three times a day when her confinement had passed. She had planned to exercise every day and indulge in wine again. Now she was thin, yet flabby, and couldn’t remember if she had even bothered to have a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve five days ago. Almost certainly not. Five days ago she had nothing to toast. Now she wanted to sing, skip through the busy hive that was Hopkins Hospital. Her daughter was coming home. She was going to get a chance to screw her up in all the normal ways.

“I guess we can get married now,” Crow said. “And finally have the baby shower that you kept vetoing.”

“Oh, right,” Tess said. She knew they had forgotten something. How funny to think she had once been obsessed about getting a ring from Crow. She had worried that he would skip out on her, that he wouldn’t be there if things got tough. Well, that was one worry gone. He had been a rock these past two months. She thought of the moment when Carole had stood over her and she told Crow she loved him, thinking she might never speak to him again. They were going to get married. They would fight. They would argue. They would be irritated with one another. That was how marriage worked. Except, possibly, for Mrs. Blossom. But Tess hoped she never forgot what it felt like to speak to him that night, Crow’s casual, “Love you, too.”

“You know,” she said now, her voice taking on a teasing tone that felt rusty and strange in her mouth. There had not been much teasing as of late. “You know, I didn’t think you were going to ask me to marry you. After all, you told Lloyd he could have the family heirloom.”

“
One
of the family heirlooms,” Crow said. “I held the better one back for you. You always forget—my family used to be well-to-do, Tess.”

“Used to be,” she said. “Now you’re poor like me.”

“Funny,” he said, “I feel pretty rich right now.”

They went for breakfast at a beloved restaurant, the Golden West, and ate their way across the world—sopapillas, pancakes, French toast, poached eggs in green curry, limeaide, and layer cake
. We’ll bring Carla Scout here
, Tess thought.
We’ll take her everywhere. We won’t treat her as if she’s made out of glass. She’s sturdy, like her mother.

* * *

The combination wedding/baby shower was over, but some guests lingered. May could not get enough of Carla Scout. Tess thought this would scare her two mommies, but Liz explained it was a hardwired instinct, this love of infants, essential to their survival. “I heard it on NPR.” Tess’s parents were in the kitchen, washing up in a silence that she now knew was companionable, the soft embers of a romance kindled by her mother’s fastidious consumption of popcorn. Crow’s mother was admiring the sweaters and caps made by Mrs. Blossom; apparently, an older woman sitting on a bench, knitting, was the greatest cover ever in surveillance. Mrs. Blossom had broken three cases of insurance fraud since January and could barely keep up with all the requests for her services, now that Valentine’s Day was near.

But it was Whitney who outlasted all the other guests, cataloging the gifts that people had brought in defiance of Tess’s instructions.

“Just think,” she said, “it could have been a double ceremony.”

“You never told me,” Tess said, “how Epstein reacted when you brought him to your mother’s house and explained that you weren’t exactly who he thought you were.”

“He was a pretty good sport,” Whitney said. “You know what? I think the pump was primed. He was terrified of Carole. It was probably only a matter of time before she killed him. Someone named Harold Lenhardt has sent you a very pretty dress. Well, not you, but Carla Scout. I can’t see you squeezing into this frock.” She held up a summery dress.

“Carla Scout will swim in that. She’s still just at fiftieth percentile for height.” Strange, they had never planned to use both names, but it suited the baby somehow, who had lost much of her hair and developed a skeptical squint in her still-hazel eyes. Lord, how she would hate them some day, for saddling her with that unwieldy name. Much as she had once hated her parents for making her Theresa Esther. Could have been worse. She could have been Shirley.